In the darkly comic mythological fable Cracking Zeus, playwright Christopher T. Hampton brings a vengeful goddess down to earth. But while the play, inventively staged by Reginald L. Douglas, reaches for divine comedy, Spooky Action Theatre’s production remains earthbound.
The angry deity in question is Hera (Nicole Ruthmarie), who deigns to set foot on Earth for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on one of her husband Zeus’ many mistresses by punishing the progeny of their affair.
That mistress would be Momma Jo (Lolita Marie), the founder, owner, treasurer, and pastor of a street corner chapel in the ’90s inner city, and her son Baniaha (Charles Franklin IV), the congregation’s youth group leader, is the ill-fated son of Zeus. Although, Baniaha doesn’t know who his father is.
He also doesn’t know that, like many a Bible thumper, Momma Jo didn’t use to walk the straight-and-narrow. But Rufus (DeJeanette Horne), the so-called “crackhead” who squats on the sidewalk outside the church, he knows. He claims to know a lot about Jo’s life before she found Jesus, while she does her best to keep the church youth far away from him and whatever truth he might reveal.
Still, drug-addled Rufus winds up holding court on the chapel’s new marble steps, pontificating sometimes wisely about the blights ravaging the city, and about the goddess who, at first, appears only to him. In a dynamic performance, Horne spins Rufus’ street philosopher revelries into a rich portrait of a mind and soul lost to addiction, though perhaps not irrevocably.
Marie’s jittery, domineering Momma Jo similarly offers a dense, colorful palette of tics and emotions that fill in some of those blanks she keeps buried in the past. In their vital supporting turns, Horne and Marie amp up the tension.
Playing the youth choir members, Bowie State’s Jacobie Thornton, and Howard U. acting students Destiny Jennings, Dupre Isaiah, and Christina Daniels as the most kindhearted of them, bring vibrant comedic energy to their roles as a veritable Greek chorus.
The emotional weight of the piece falls on Hera and Baniaha, however, and, in those roles, respectively, Ruthmarie and Franklin register the intention without the full force of feeling behind it.
Gorgeously costumed, if not that originally, in goddess white throughout, Ruthmarie conveys Hera’s haughtiness, expressed in her plummy, eloquent speeches. The language rolls off Ruthmarie’s tongue and sits there, a mellifluous sound signifying disdain and displeasure, but disconnected from the hurt and humiliation that might motivate this queen to plot something so evil as getting someone hooked on crack.
Douglas’ production realizes Hampton’s fanciful depiction of the crack-ridden ’90s with astute design and details — like the Washington Bullets jersey and FUBU tee on the kids — that also evoke the story’s nods to ancient Greek myth. From the chapel’s marble steps, to the Greek drama-masked figures whose haunting dance interludes signal a descent into a crack high, ancient and modern religion meet on Momma Jo’s corner.
There, Hampton lands the play’s surest insight, that crack didn’t just happen to the hood, but was a deliberately wielded weapon of mass destruction.
Cracking Zeus (★★☆☆☆) runs through Oct. 13, at Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St. NW. Tickets are $15 to $38. Call 202-248-0301, or visit www.spookyaction.org.
Based on its stunning trailer -- propelled by early-Hollywood actor Taylor Holmes' ripping 1915 recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem "Boots" -- one might expect 28 Years Later to focus on a father and son's war for survival against zombie-like hordes.
Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, creators of the 2002 series originator 28 Days Later, the film does venture with 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his rugged dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), into territory crawling with rage virus-infected human predators.
Yet, that's just a piece of a richer narrative anchored by the drama of domestic dysfunction within Spike's family, which also includes his homebound, mentally ill mom, Isla (Jodie Comer).
Dark comedy done well can be so delicious. It takes a certain alchemy to lace tales of death and desperation with unabashed humor, but the Coen Brothers hit the target dead-center with Fargo, and then off to the side with Burn After Reading.
Danny DeVito, when he was directing movies, nailed the tone of black comedy with the homicidal shenanigans in Throw Momma from the Train, then again by pushing a divorcing couple off a proverbial cliff in The War of the Roses. In that bitter anti-romance, the jokes, both achingly sad and viciously funny, cut deeper the bleaker the Roses' battle becomes.
Life is a cabaret at the titular bolero bar in GALA Hispanic Theatre's Botiquín de Boleros de Columbia Heights. Of course, for this lively, immersive staging, directed and choreographed by Valeria Cossu, we, the audience, are the patrons at the Columbia Heights Bolero Bar.
Seated at cabaret tables onstage, at stage level, or in regular seats throughout the house, audience members may find themselves in the midst of the action for Rubén Léon's heartfelt backstage musical revue, adapted by GALA artistic director Gustavo Ott.
Formerly a mainstay of D.C.'s diverse Columbia Heights neighborhood, the fictional boîte was "one of the hottest cabarets" in town, we're told. But due to the pandemic, it has sat dormant for years, until now -- now being November 2024, just ahead of a presidential election that will prove particularly pivotal for immigrants like some of the performers who call the club home.
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